Month: June 2021

What’s for supper? Vol. 254: Egg cream, duck egg, opera nite

Happy Friday! Today is the first day all week I’ve known what day it is.

Before we go any further, it has come to my attention that not everybody knows what an egg cream is. I made one for Corrie the other day, and she pronounced it weird but good, which it is. 

You put a few inches of milk in a glass and add tons of chocolate syrup, and mix it well. Then you carefully pour seltzer in to fill up the glass, leaving plenty of room for the foam. The foam is deliciously strange, surprisingly dry, with a faint chocolate skin, and then the drink itself is refreshing like no other. More of a treat on a hot day than soda, but not heavy like ice cream or a shake. 

If you’re wondering about the name: No, it didn’t originally have either eggs or cream. It’s a drink invented by Brooklyn Jews, and one theory is that it was an “echte cream,” real cream. I don’t know. Anyway, try it! 

Here’s what we apparently cooked and ate this week:

SATURDAY

Kids had dino-shaped chicken nuggets, adults went to Señor Tadpole’s and had the sampler plate with some margaritas. It was very good, but I’m now mature and secure enough to admit that, when I go to a Mexican restaurant, I’m really in it for the beans. Oh, I’ll eat the rest, but gosh, those beans.

SUNDAY
Chicken quesadillas, chips

Nothing to report, except that Damien cooked it, and there is no better food than the food someone else cooks for you. Chicken coated with Tajin seasoning, roasted, and sliced, made into quesadillas with sharp cheddar cheese and jalapeño slices. 

also OPERA NITE
Since the kids had the day off on Monday, we stayed up late for OPERA NITE, which involves, yes, opera, but more importantly, fancy snacks, including chili mango goat cheese and the all-important mini chocolate eclairs

and exotic soda in dollar store champagne flutes

Even the dog noticed how classy this was (he showed up in his tuxedo, ha ha).

Our first Opera Nite, Don Giovanni, was a howling success, but the next two times we attempted it (The Barber of Seville and Carmen), we lost steam at intermission, planned to watch the second half another night, ran out of snacks, and never got around to it. So this time, we withheld snacks until intermission, and then forged through to the end. I think it worked better (we did watch the whole thing!) but the whining about not being able to eat snacks yet kind of put a damper on the first two acts. 

Anyway, we chose Le Nozze di Figaro with Bryn Terfel, Cecilia Bartoli, and Renée Fleming, and it was fab. We rented it through Met Opera on Demand.

In the past, we’ve made Opera Nite mandatory, but we have so many adult kids now, we let it be optional. We started out with six or seven kids in attendance and ended up with four by the end. Three of them spent the first two acts drawing in their sketchbooks, which annoyed me, but at least they were in the same room with the music. Then the natural drawing light faded and one kid left, but the other two started paying attention to the subtitles and were hooked. We read a plot synopsis for the first half, just to get our foot in the door, but we let the second half be a surprise, and it was very entertaining and funny. The plot moves right along, and it has some good twists but isn’t so convoluted you can’t follow it. The music is glorious, of course. A few arias are just heartbreaking. Wonderful production, sumptuous scenery and costumes, excellent casting. Kids can definitely follow the action (especially if they can read), but it does hinge on seduction and adultery and the threat of droit du seigneur, so viewer beware. I think our next opera will have more vengeance and stabbing. 

MONDAY
Hot dogs of many nations, tater tots

Life has gotten very, very drivey lately (kids going to job interviews, kids needing to be driven to their new jobs, kids needing practice driving so they can eventually drive themselves to their new jobs, etc.) so Damien has been cooking a lot, and on Monday he made a lavish hot dog display. I just had mustard and about a cubic foot of sauerkraut on mine, which is obviously the best way to have a hot dog, but there was also chili, cheese, various vegetables, and a good selection of whatnot. 

TUESDAY
Carnitas, guacamole, fruit salad

This is the best-smelling dinner in the universe, and if you start early in the day, you get tons of flavor with very little effort. You simmer the seasoned pork in Coke and oil with cinnamon sticks, orange wedges, and bay leaves for two hours, then continue cooking the meat until it becomes dark and wonderful.

Even darker than that!

Drain, shred, and serve the meat on tortillas with sour cream and cilantro, or pico de gallo, or whatever you like. Here’s my guacamole recipe:

Jump to Recipe

And here’s the carnitas recipe from J.R.’s Art Place. 

This meat is also wonderful with beans and rice, but after making guacamole and a big fruit salad, I ran out of steam. 

You know, sometimes people are all, oh, Simcha, you cook such heavy, unhealthy food all the time, and I’m like, oh, no, you’re right, I’m terrible, but then I remember that when I was growing up, I don’t think we ever ever had a vegetable that didn’t have cheese on it, and that included salad. And if it was fruit salad, we put sugar on it.  

WEDNESDAY
Sugar rub pork ribs, roasted corn on the cob

Damien made his most excellent sugar rub, and grilled the ribs outside. I bought a bottle of sauce to go with pork ribs, but I didn’t even bother putting it on the table, because I didn’t want to mess with that flavor or that beautiful caramelized crust.

Jump to Recipe

 

If you can get white pepper, you get this extra kind of peppery effervescence you don’t get with black pepper. 

The corn, sometimes you just don’t feel like boiling a giant pot of water for corn, so oven broiling works fine. I poured melted butter on the shucked ears and roasted them in a very hot oven for about ten minutes, turning them once. I had them wrapped in tin foil to keep the butter and steam in, but opened it up toward the end. I meant to get a little char on them, but I was too hungry to let them keep cooking.

THURSDAY
Pizza

Yay, pizza! Two pepperoni, one cheese, one olive, and one olive, feta, onion, fresh basil, artichoke heart, and fresh parmesan. No photo, alas. I had missed the last several days of running because I hurt my foot, and the only time we had to go on Thursday was in the evening, so I made the pizzas, went running, and came back and had cold pizza, and that’s how I choose to live my life. 

FRIDAY
Mac and cheese and mac and cheese and mac and cheese

I’m just planning to make a lot of it! Can’t help myself! My mac and cheese recipe is just to make a big pot of white sauce, throw in whatever cheeses are in the house, and then either a little mustard, or a little hot sauce, or both, to save it from blandness. Mix the cheese sauce with boiled macaroni, pour into a buttered casserole dish, top with buttered panko crumbs, and bake until golden brown. 

Oh, wanna see my beautiful lo mein from last Friday? Shrimp, fresh ginger, and sugar snap peas. I usually use mirin to deglaze the pan before adding the noodles, but I was out, so I used rice vinegar instead. SO MUCH BETTER. I’m doing it that way from now on.

Jump to Recipe

 

I didn’t realize how sweet mirin is!

I wish I had some lo mein right now. But mac and cheese is good, too, I guess.

One final culinary note: Damien and I go running on a very rural road, and a house there has started selling duck eggs. We bought a dozen and holy wow, they are good. And huge!

They taste like chicken eggs except the yolk is incredibly rich; and the white fluffs up nicely when you fry it, and doesn’t stick to the pan. Magic. We are uh thinking of getting some ducks. Probably just female ducks. I’ve been reading up on male ducks and we do not need any kind of #timesup situation in our back yard. 

5 from 1 vote
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White Lady From NH's Guacamole

Ingredients

  • 4 avocados
  • 1 medium tomato, diced
  • 1 medium jalapeno, minced
  • 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped roughly
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 2 limes juiced
  • 1 tsp chili powder
  • salt and pepper
  • 1/2 red onion, diced

Instructions

  1. Peel avocados. Mash two and dice two. 

  2. Mix together with rest of ingredients and add seasonings.

  3. Cover tightly, as it becomes discolored quickly. 

 

 

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sugar smoked ribs

the proportions are flexible here. You can adjust the sugar rub to make it more or less spicy or sweet. Just pile tons of everything on and give it puh-lenty of time to smoke.

Ingredients

  • rack pork ribs
  • yellow mustard
  • Coke
  • extra brown sugar

For the sugar rub:

  • 1-1/2 cups brown sugar
  • 1/2 cups white sugar
  • 2 Tbsp chili powder
  • 2 Tbsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 2 Tbsp salt
  • 1 Tbsp white pepper

Instructions

  1. Coat the ribs in yellow mustard and cover them with sugar rub mixture

  2. Smoke at 225 for 3 hours

  3. Take ribs out, make a sort of envelope of tin foil and pour Coke and brown sugar over them. close up the envelope.

  4. Return ribs to smoker and cook another 2 hours.

  5. Remove tinfoil and smoke another 45-min.

  6. Finish on grill to give it a char.

 

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basic lo mein

Ingredients

for the sauce

  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 5 tsp sesame oil
  • 5 tsp sugar

for the rest

  • 32 oz uncooked noodles
  • sesame oil for cooking
  • add-ins (vegetables sliced thin or chopped small, shrimp, chicken, etc.)
  • 2/3 cup rice vinegar (or mirin, which will make it sweeter)

Instructions

  1. Mix together the sauce ingredients and set aside.

  2. Boil the noodles until slightly underdone. Drain and set aside.

  3. Heat up a pan, add some sesame oil for cooking, and quickly cook your vegetables or whatever add-ins you have chosen.

  4. Add the mirin to the pan and deglaze it.

  5. Add the cooked noodles in, and stir to combine. Add the sauce and stir to combine.

10 gifts you ought to give your teenagers

As our kids get older, we find it harder and harder to choose gifts for them, now that we can no longer just scan the toy aisle and pick out something neat and colorful. We ask for wish lists, and on them are items that, not only do I not understand why someone would want them, I don’t even completely know what they are.

But I do know how to give older kids the intangible things they need on the 363 days of the year, when it’s not their birthday or Christmas (and not a single one of them needs a charging cable). These are things that may or may not delight them when they receive them, but may stay with them and help them for the rest of their lives.

  1. Being needed. Let them feel the feeling of being important to another human being. This can happen automatically in large families, but even there, some kids are good at escaping responsibility. But understanding that we are responsible for other people is a fundamental part of being human, and kids should learn it early. Some families overdo this, and turn kids, especially girls, into mini parents. This is unjust, and will lead to resentment and burnout. But if your child tends to feel that the world is here to serve him, that needs correcting. All kids should be in charge of something important, even if it’s small.2. The gift of being listened to, even if it’s something you don’t personally care about, because you care about your kid. Let them know more than you about something, and be really interested to hear all about it. Teenagers can come across as arrogant know-it-alls, but this, like so many unpleasant teen traits, often stems from insecurity. They desperately want to prove they’re smart and well-informed and interesting and worthy of attention. So sometimes step back and let them show their stuff, and compliment them on how well they know their topic. They may act like they don’t care, but they probably care very much, and will be very pleased to know they’ve impressed you. More importantly, if you are in the habit of listening to them chatter about inconsequential stuff, they are more likely to come to you with stuff that does matter.
  2. The gift of earning stuff they want. It can be tempting to give teenagers everything they think they need to make them happy, because you want them to be happy and you want them to be happy with you. But you’ll be giving them a much more long-lasting gift if you help them figure out how to do some work to earn some money to get the thing. This will also help them become more discerning about just how badly they want or need some item.
  3. The gift of getting away with things. Sometimes, let stuff ride. Just don’t notice it. It will be easier on all of you if you just pretend you don’t hear that tone of voice, didn’t notice that mess, aren’t aware of that screw-up, don’t care about that bad habit. It’s okay to have personal limits about what you’ll put up with, but make sure you’re not constantly correcting every last little thing. Prioritize, and save your correcting energy for things that really need it.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly. 

 

Image by Luisella Planeta Leoni from Pixabay

Yes, you should have a crucifix on your wall

A friend told me that a friend of her, a priest who was an exorcist, had cleansed a house of demons not long ago. The priest noticed and remarked that there were no crucifixes hung anywhere on the walls, even though the family was Catholic.

No crosses, no icons, no devotional pictures, no holy cards, no tin Sacred Hearts, no dried-up palm branches stuffed behind a family photo. No Bible, decorative or otherwise. But especially, no crucifix.

I only heard his comment second-hand, so I’m not sure if there was any follow-up, or how much importance he attached to it. Still, he thought it was worth remarking on, and so it’s something I’ve been thinking about. Why should we hang crucifixes in our house, if not to ward off demons?

Well, warding off demons isn’t actually a bad motivation. The cross, and specifically the crucifix, does have a certain amount of power just because of what it is, and (just purely speculating as a layman), I can imagine an unclean spirit at very least feeling uncomfortable around it, and less willing to settle in.

But of course, the crucifix isn’t a magic charm or a lucky horseshoe. What I can more easily imagine is an unclean spirit feeling uncomfortable in the kind of house where a crucifix is not only hung, but noticed and revered.

But let’s say you hung up a crucifix, and that was the end of it. You did it because you always had one growing up, or because you wanted to make your grandmother happy, or because it just looks pretty. You don’t especially revere it or even notice it after a while. Is it still worthwhile?

I think so. Simply hanging a crucifix on the wall where everyone can see it will likely feel like an act of courage and loyalty in this aggressively secular, post-Christian time. It’s not easy to buck the culture.

But if your house has no crucifix or other holy images on display, and especially if you’re resistant to the idea of making that happen, you could ask yourself why. If your reason is purely aesthetic, that’s an easy problem to solve.

No matter how carefully curated the decor of your house, there is a crucifix for your tastes. In the course of two thousand years old, Christianity has reached every culture and continent, and that means there are crucifixes rendered in every conceivable style. That’s kind of a feature of the cross: It’s never going to be irrelevant, anywhere or at any time.

But that’s just aesthetics. Maybe your antipathy goes a little deeper, and you’re afraid people will think you’re some kind of fanatic — or worse, they’ll see you as some kind of pervert or enabler. Maybe you don’t hang a crucifix because you don’t want to be associated with the ugliness that is so often the face of the Catholic Church today.

 
Well, that is actually the point of the cross. It is ugly. It is shameful. It is painfully public.
 

It shows innocence betrayed, and it shows someone suffering for crimes he did not commit. It shows humanity’s darkest hour. It is therefore especially appropriate to display when the corporate Church has let its flock down so horribly.

I’ll just say it: Refusing to hang a crucifix because you don’t want to be associated with thing like that is dangerously close to rejecting Jesus. 

If you can’t be publicly Catholic when being Catholic looks bad, then what’s the point? The way Jesus found himself on the cross in the first place is because he decided to hang around with the likes of us. He chose to associate himself with a whole race of perverts, enablers, cowards, narcissists, predators, liars, cheats, and thugs, and this is where it got him.
 

This is where it got us: A few breaths away from the Beatific Vision, by way of the cross.

And that’s really the main issue. Putting a crucifix on the wall of your home is not primarily for the benefit of any visitors who might see it. It’s for yourself. It’s so you can look at it in peace and prosperity and remember how ephemeral worldly peace and prosperity are.

And it’s so you can look at it in terrible, painful times and see that pain is never empty and meaningless because is full of the company of Christ. And it’s so you can remember that the cross, that instrument of torture, is occupied — not by you, but by the one who took your place for no good reason at all except that he loves you.

The crucifix isn’t a lucky charm that chases away bogeymen. It’s something much stranger: It’s the disrupter of every fakery, and the answer that makes a mockery out of every foolish question. But it hangs so quietly, willing to be ignored.

Let’s not.

 

 

 

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A version of this essay was first published in the Catholic Weekly in 2019.